Music

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Paul Clark and Steve Carlson have but two new inductees intothe Muriels Hall of Fame that have yet to be announced, one perhaps an obvious choice, the other maybe not so obvious. You'll have to stay tuned tomorrow and Thursday to find out which undeniably great movies will find their place in the august, newly inaugurated institution. In the meantime, there were already six movies named to the MHOF before the new batch began taking up residence, and nine other new inductees that have already been announced. All 15 of these films have short but sweet considerations now available for your perusal on the Muriels blog, Our Science is Too Tight, each one penned by a different Muriels writer. Click on the links below to access terrific pieces on the following great movies that have already found a place in the MHOF:

Finally, for now anyway, there's my own piece, published today, to commemorate the induction of Jean Renoir's blissfully acerbic THE RULES OF THE GAME(1939), surely one of the greatest movies ever made. Here's what I wrote about this wonderful movie for the Muriels Hall of Fame.

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Movies
both good and bad have always sent out ripples which have caused the
surface waters of cinema history to undulate and swoon and reflect their
influence, however undue, benign, creative or destructive. The waves
generated and felt by truly great movies, on the other hand, shift the
contours of the surface, all right, but their real influence can be
almost subterranean, affecting not only the way movies in their wake
look and sound and feel, but also how the sensibilities at the heart of
their creation can speak across oceans and generations.

When Jean Renoir’s Le regle de jeu (The Rules of the Game)
was conceived, written and filmed, in a span between 1938 and 1939,
France was a country torn in its political tolerance and responses to
cataclysmic events on the European front that made the looming shadow of
Hitler’s rise to power and influence ever harder to ignore. Renoir’s
film, a comic roundelay of marital discord, class-generated disdain and
general societal distraction decorated with a patina of good manners and
brittle loyalties, sought to engage with its audience in a
paradoxically airy manner, to diagnose and autopsy the corrosively
blithe ignorance the director saw at the heart of the country’s, and
indeed Europe’s, collective self-deception with a sort of romantic
sleight of hand. (Renoir once famously characterized the movie as a
portrait of a complex society dancing on a volcano.)

Renoir
cast himself as the would-be fool, Octave, a caustic but affable bear
of a man (quite literally a bear, at one point) whose allegiances to the
various players in an ostensibly breezy farce of adultery, the
sophistication of which becomes ever more apparently feigned and
insincere, are almost immediately tested. (His friend LeChesnaye, lord
of the manor, sees him, at least initially, less a fool than a dangerous
poet.) Octave’s empathy-- 'Everyone has their reasons'-- extends not
only to his wealthy hosts, who have invited each other’s lovers,
Genevieve, a bored society wife and Andre, a famous (and famously
lovelorn) aviator, along with several other friends to a weekend of
frivolity at their country estate. He also shares the hearts of various
members of the mansion’s staff, and the confusion of those empathies
will fuel the tragedy at the heart of Renoir’s liltingly critical vision
of cultural decadence and casual brutality. The film’s famous pheasant
hunting sequence may be even more difficult to watch today than it was
in 1939, but some of the sympathetic conversation in The Rules of the Game
is similarly cutting. When LeChesnaye’s wife Christine discovers that
her husband’s own betrayal, which has gone far more effectively hidden
than the one she has rather openly cultivated with the aviator, it is
Octave who justifies the deception by associating it with the general
behavior of the times. "Everyone lies," he tells her, "pharmaceutical
fliers, government, newspapers, the cinema. So why shouldn’t simple
people like us lie as well?"

Reviled upon its release, Renoir’s movie can be felt in everything from the tacky violence of Larry Peerce’s The Sporting Club (1970), based on a Thomas McGuane novel, to Alan Bridges’ The Shooting Party (1985), to intimate epics of television drama like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey and, of course, features like Gosford Park, written by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. (One could go even further and suggest that the career of Robert Altman, director of Gosford Park,
might not exist in quite the same way without the encouraging influence
of Renoir stretching to inspire his own.) But what’s most striking
about watching The Rules of the Game in 2013, what cements its
stature as a truly great movie, is the degree to which its political and
interpersonal acuity seem, aside from its period specifics,
simultaneously of its time and also utterly contemporary. This 1939
film, made in the darkening path of perhaps the greatest evil the world
has ever seen, can connect to contemporary audiences in surprisingly
painful and biting ways. The sense of global malaise, isolation and
insecurity—some of it inspired by technology of which Renoir could never
have dreamed— which is a hallmark of our own very modern
self-deceptions and distractions is effortlessly accessed here, making
Renoir’s marvelously deft and witty movie seem as pertinent, and as
impertinent, as it ever was.

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Be sure to check up on the final two inductees announced to the Muriels Hall of Fame tomorrow and Thursday at Our Science is Too Tight.

2 comments:

Rules of the Game wasn't on the list already? For shame. Of course, I always argue with myself about what year it should be credited for for release. The original 96 minute cut greeted with boos in 1939, it got slashed to an 81 minute cut that was the only version which didn't make its way to the U.S. until 1950. Though WWII destroyed the original negative, Jean Gaborit and Jacques Marechal, with the blessing of Renoir. managed to make the restored 106 minute version we love that didn't bow until 1959. One little nitpick: I wouldn't call Jurieu one of the lovers there for the weekend. He had unrequited feelings for Christine, but he never got to act on them, despite her flirting, the way Genevieve and the Marquis carried on.

As for the Muriels Hall of Fame, the first six movies that were already in there were, I believe, the winners of the Muriels 50th anniversary award, the best movie from 50 years previous, starting in 2007. There really hasn't been a Hall of Fame as such until now, so Rules of the Game is more or less getting in on the ground floor.